Volume Ii Part 1 (2/2)
”You are mistaken again,” said he. ”Save in a few companies of the line, never did troops behave better: four entire squadrons of one regiment were cut to pieces at the end of the Rue Royale; two infantry regiments were actually annihilated at the Hotel de Ville. For eight hours, at the Place du Carrousel, we had no ammunition, while the insurgents poured in a most murderous fire: so was it along the Quai Voltaire.”
”I have heard,” said I, ”that the Duc de Raguse lost his head completely.”
”I can a.s.sure you, sir, they who say so calumniate him,” was the calm reply. ”Never before that day was a Marshal of France called upon to fight an armed host, without soldiers and without ammunition.”
”His fate would induce us to be superst.i.tious, and believe in good luck.
Never was there a man more persecuted by ill fortune!”
”I perceive they are shutting the gates,” said my companion, rising; ”these worthy Meranersare of the very earliest to retire for the night.”
And so saying, and with a ”Good night,” so hastily uttered as to forbid further converse, my companion withdrew, while I wandered slowly back to my Inn, curious to learn who he might be, and if I should ever chance upon him again.
I heard a voice this morning on the bridge, so exactly like that of my companion of last night, that I could not help starting. The speaker was a very large and singularly handsome man, who, though far advanced in life, walked with a stature as erect, and an air as a.s.sured, as he could have worn in youth. Large bushy eye-brows, black as jet, although his hair was perfectly white, shaded eyes of undimmed brilliancy--he was evidently ”some one,” the least observant could not pa.s.s him without this conviction. I asked a stranger who he was, and received for answer, ”Marshal Marmont--he comes here almost every autumn.”
CHAPTER II. THE TYROL
Every traveller in the Tyrol must have remarked, that, wherever the way is difficult of access, or dangerous to traverse, some little shrine or statue is always to be seen, reminding him that a higher Power than his own watches over his safety, and suggesting the fitness of an appeal to Him who is ”A very present help in time of trouble.”
Sometimes a rude painting upon a little board, nailed on a tree, communicates the escape and grat.i.tude of a traveller; sometimes a still ruder fresco, on the very rock, tells where a wintry torrent had swept away a whole family, and calling on all pious Christians who pa.s.s that way to offer a prayer for the departed. There is an endless variety in these little ”Votive Tablets,” which are never more touching than when their very rude poverty attests the simplest faith of a simple people.
The Tyrolers are indeed such. Perhaps alone, of all the accessible parts of Europe, the Tyrol has preserved its primitive habits and tastes for centuries unchanged. Here and there, throughout the continent, to be sure, you will find some little ”Dorf,” or village, whose old-world customs stand out in contrast to its neighbours; and where in their houses, dress, and bearing, the inhabitants seem unlike all else around them. Look more closely, however, and you will see that, although the grandmother is clothed in homespun, and wears her leathern pocket at her girdle, all studded with copper nails, that her grandaughter affects a printed cotton or a Swiss calico; and instead of the broad-brimmed and looped felt of the old ”Bauer,” the new generation sport broad-cloth and beaver.
Such hamlets are, therefore, only like the pa.s.sengers left behind by their own coach, and waiting for the next conveyance that pa.s.ses to carry them on their journey.
In the Tyrol, however, such evidences of progress--as it is the fas.h.i.+on to call it--are rare. The peasantry seem content to live as their fathers have done, and truly he must be sanguine who could hope to better a condition, which, with so few prorations, comprises so many of life's best and dearest blessings. If the mountain peaks be snow-clad, even in midsummer, the valleys (at least all in South Tyrol) are rich in vineyards and olive groves; and although wheat is seldom seen, the maize grows every where; the rivers swarm with trout; and he must be a poor marksman who cannot have venison for his dinner. The villages are large and well built; the great wooden houses, with their wide projecting roofs and endless galleries, are the very types of comfort. Vast piles of fire-wood, for winter use, large granaries of forage for the cattle--the cattle themselves with great silver bells hanging to their necks--all bespeak an ease, if not an actual affluence, among the peasantry. The Tyrolers are, in a word, all that poets and tourists say the Swiss are, and of which they are exactly the reverse.
It would be difficult to find two nations so precisely alike in all external circ.u.mstances, and so perfectly dissimilar in every feature of character. Even in their religious feelings, Romanism, generally so levelling, has not been able to make them of the same measure here.
The Swiss Catholic--bigotted, overbearing, and plotting--has nothing in common with the simple-minded Tyroler, whose faith enters into all the little incidents of his daily life, cheering, exalting, and sustaining, but never suggesting a thought save of charity and good will to all.
That they have interwoven, so to say, their religious belief into all their little worldly concerns, if not making their faith the rule, at least establis.h.i.+ng it as the companion of their conduct, is easily seen.
You never overtake a group, returning from fair or market, that all are not engaged in prayer, repeating together some litany of the Church; and as each new arrival joins the party, his voice chimes in, and swells the solemn hum as naturally as if prearranged or practised.
If you pa.s.s a village, or a solitary farmhouse, at sunset, the same accents meet your ears, or else you hear them singing some hymn in concert. Few ”Bauer” houses, of any pretension, are without the effigy of a patron saint above the door, and even the humblest will have a verse of a psalm, or a pious sentence, carved in the oaken beam. Their names are taken from the saintly calendar, and every thing, to the minutest particular, shews that their faith is an active working principle, fas.h.i.+oning all their actions, and mingling with all their thoughts. Their superst.i.tions, like all simple-minded and secluded people's, are many; their ignorance is not to be denied; mayhap the Church has fostered the one, and done little to enlighten the other: still, if Romanism had no heavier sin to account for, no darker score to clear up, than her dealings in these mountains, there would be much to forgive in a creed that has conferred so many good gifts, and sowed the seeds of so few bad ones.
These pious emblems find their way, too, into places where one would scarce look for them--over the doors of village inns, and as signs to little wine and beer-houses: and frequently the Holy personages are a.s.sociated with secular usages, strangely at variance with the saintly character. Thus I have seen, in the village beside me, a venerable St.
Martin engaged in the extraordinary operation of shoeing a horse; though what veterinary tastes the saint ever evinced, or why he is so represented, I can find no one to inform me. On the summit of steep pa.s.ses, where it is usual, by a police regulation, to prescribe the use of a drag to all wheel carriages, the board which sets forth the direction is commonly ornamented by a St. Michael, very busily applying the drag to a heavy waggon, while the driver thereof is on his knees hard by, wors.h.i.+pping the saint, in evident delight at his dexterity. In the same way many venerable and holy men are to be seen presiding over savoury hams and goblets of foaming beer, and beaming with angelic beat.i.tude at a party of hard-drinking villagers in the distance. Our present business is, however, less with the practice in general, than a particular instance, which is to be met with in the Bavarian Tyrol, mid-way between the villages of Murnou and Steingaden, where over the door of a solitary little way-side inn hangs a representation of the Virgin, with a starling perched upon her wrist. One has only to remark the expression of unnatural intelligence in the bird's look, to be certain that it was not a mere fancy of the artist to have placed her thus, but that some event of village tradition, or history, is interwoven with her presence.
The motto contributes nothing to the explanation. It is merely a line from the Church Litany, ”Maria, Mutter Grottes, hulf uns,--Mary, Mother of G.o.d, help us!”
There is then a story connected with the painting, and we shall, with your leave, tell it; calling our tale by the name of the little inn,
”MARIA HULF!”
Has our reader ever heard, or read, of those strange gatherings, which take place at the early spring in the greater number of southern German cities and are called, ”Year Markets?” The object is simply to a.s.semble the youth of the mountain districts in Tyrol and Vorarlbreg, that they may be hired, by the farmers of the rich pasture countries, as herds.
Thither they go---many a mile--some children of ten or eleven years old, and seeming even still younger, away from home and friends, little adventurers on the bleak wide ocean of life, to sojourn among strangers in far-off lands; to pa.s.s days long in lonely valleys or deep glens, without a sight or sound of human life around them; watching the bright sun and counting the weary minutes over, that night and rest may come, per* chance with dreams of that far-off home, which, in all its poverty, is still cheered by the fond familiar faces! Some, ruddy and stout-looking, seem to relish the enterprise, and actually enjoy the career so promising in its vicissitudes; others, sad and care-worn, bear with them the sorrows of their last leave-taking, and are only comforted by the thought that autumn will come at last, and then the cattle must be housed for the winter: and then they shall be free to wend their way over mountain and plain, far, far away beyond Maltz--high in the wild peaks of the Stelvio, or deep in the lovely glens below Meran.
<script>